Covid's Mu variant - An analysis

A full udpate on what the new Mu variant of novel coronavirus is

 Covid's Mu variant - An analysis

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• The story: Since January 2020, the novel coronavirus and its variants have kept all governments busy. As the pandemic extracted its human toll, the virus kept presenting itself in new ways, to be decoded genomically.
• Mu has arrived: On August 30, the World Health Organization (WHO) added a new variant of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes Covid-19, to its list of ‘Variants of Interest’ (VOI). The lineage B.1.621 variant, named ‘Mu’ after the twelfth letter of the Greek alphabet, was detected first in the South American country of Colombia in January 2021.
• Variant of Interest: All viruses mutate or undergo certain changes over time, helping them to spread easily, escape our vaccines, medicines and survive. Today, there are many SARS-CoV-2 variants circulating globally.

1. Mu is the fifth ‘VOI’ to be monitored by the WHO.
2. The other four VOIs, named according to the simplified scheme of nomenclature announced by the WHO on May 31 this year, are - (i) Eta (lineage B.1.525, documented in multiple countries from December 2020); (ii) Iota (lineage B.1.526, first documented in the United States in November 2020); (iii) Kappa (lineage B.1.617.1, first documented in India in October 2020); and (iv) Lambda (lineage C.37, the so-called Peru variant, which was first documented in that country in December 2020).
3. WHO places a SARS-CoV-2 variant in the VOI list if it is seen to have certain “genetic changes that are predicted or known to affect virus characteristics such as transmissibility, disease severity, immune escape, diagnostic or therapeutic escape”. A variant must also be “identified to cause significant community transmission or multiple Covid-19 clusters in multiple countries”, and suggest “an emerging risk to global public health”.

• ‘Variants of Concern’ (VOC): According to the WHO, a VOI can become a VOC if it is demonstrated to be associated with an increase in transmissibility or virulence, or with a “decrease in effectiveness of public health and social measures or available diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics”. Four variants of the coronavirus are designated as variants of concern. They are -

1. Alpha (lineage B.1.1.7, the so-called ‘UK variant’), which was first detected in the United Kingdom in September 2020, and is now present in at least 193 countries around the world;
2. Beta (lineage B.1.351, the so-called ‘South Africa variant’), the first samples of which were detected in South Africa in May 2020, and which has so far been reported from 141 countries;
3. Gamma (lineage P.1, the so-called ‘Brazil variant’), which was first detected in Brazil in November 2020, and which has been reported in 91 countries;
4. Delta (lineage B.1.617.2), the variant that was first reported in India in October 2020 and is now present in at least 170 countries. The highly transmissible Delta variant is now the dominant strain of the virus in India, and was responsible for the devastating second wave of Covid-19 in April-May this year.

• Mu: The new Mu variant (which includes the descendant Pango lineage B.1.621.1; known as 21H in Nextstrain nomenclature) has “a constellation of mutations that indicate potential properties of immune escape”. The WHO said that since being first identified in Colombia, a few cases and some larger outbreaks of the Mu variant have been reported from other countries in South America and in Europe.

1. The variant has not been detected in India so far. It is also not present in Africa, Australia, and most of Asia. Globally, the cumulative prevalence of Mu is less than 0.5 per cent, according to outbreak.info, using GISAID data.
2. The Mu variant has several substitutions affecting the spike protein and amino acid changes.The mutations — E484K, N501Y, P681H, D614G — seen in the Mu variant have been reported in other VOIs and VOCs. These mutations are known to help the virus escape the body’s immune defences and increase transmissibility.
3. The Mu variant also has other spike mutations of interest (R346K) which need further study.

• Existing vaccines and Mu: There are few studies on this aspect, but research found that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was able to neutralise the Mu variant, but its effectiveness was less compared to other variants. The possibility of the virus mutating into new and potentially more dangerous variants is constant. Experts and public health agencies around the world have urged universal vaccination against the coronavirus as quickly as possible.
• Summary: The longer the world takes in vaccinating everyone, the more will be the new mutations possible.
• EXAM QUESTIONS: (1) Explain the role of genomic decoding in battling the Covid-19 pandemic. (2) Explain how the Mu variant of novel coronavirus is different from the Delta variant.

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